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Volapük: A Cautionary Tale for Language Communities

80 points by anewhnaccount 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago
Language home page: http://volapük.com/ http://volapük.com/
- tormeh 10y ago
  I'm fluent in English, know a fair bit of German and some very basic French and I can't understand any Volapük. If Europe's ever going to speak the same language it's going to be through the languages growing closer, eliminating different spellings of existing loanwords and creating new ones that are universal. None of the knowledge I have of European languages carry over to Volapük, at least in terms of vocabulary. That, to me, looks like a mistake on Volapük's part.
  - schoen 10y ago
    You would probably have a very different experience with Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua (The weirdest thing for me about it as a Latin and Portuguese speaker is that adjectives aren't inflected for number, so you have phrases like "servicios tangibile" and "contributiones actual", which sound kind of bizarre throughout the Romance milieu, where the adjectives would have to be pluralized too.) You can see some sample texts at http://www.interlingua.com/ http://www.interlingua.com/ or for example http://www.interlingua.com/libros/ http://www.interlingua.com/libros/ Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-)
    - wtbob 10y ago
      > Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-) Well, if at least one of those multiple European languages is a Romance tongue, sure. But if someone speaks fluent Manx, English, Icelandic and Norwegian, he'll probably have more than a little trouble with it …
      - schoen 10y ago
        It would definitely be quite a bit harder, but all of those languages will have had some degree of Latin and Romance borrowing so they'll still confer at least a little benefit.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
bluejekyll 10y ago
> Volapük was a hybrid of English, German, and French I found this funny, because that's basically what English is.
- yborg 10y ago
  English is more of a mongrel than that even, there are substantial additions from Latin and Greek as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...
  - Grue3 10y ago
    Name any (natural) language that's "pure". English is hardly unique in that respect.
    - jrochkind1 10y ago
      No languages are pure, although some languages in modern times have official national bodies trying to keep them as 'pure' as possible (like French), they're still not 'pure' in any way. But English is especially hybrid. Some think that contributed to it's global popularity as a second language, but I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English.
      - jmfayard 10y ago
        > I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English ... and if you want to argue otherwise, you will have to explain why russian had such good linguistic characteristics in east-europe between 1945 and 1989, and not so much since then :)
  - 13of40 10y ago
    That's a very aptly named PIE chart.
bluejekyll 10y ago
> lesson to be learned here: any language is only as strong as its community Or maybe it's better lesson is that no one tries to force the direction of the language. English is a bastard language, no one "controls", even as much as our grammar school teachers try to force us to use the proper form. I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively. The examples that the OP point out are top down choices made by "leaders" of the community. Those leaders may have created the original programming language, but then fail to realize that it is not they that control it, it is the community. And communities often don't want to be forced in one direction or another. What they like is for things to be grass roots, everyone in the community recognizes the issue, a proposal is put forward, and everyone then agrees and progress is made. This is one reason that I'm enjoying Rust's process, example: try!(..) was a macro based bandaid over the unwieldy nature of the strong error Result type in the language, it's usage has created code which is ugly and verbose. Enter Swift with its ? syntax and everyone recognizes that this is a less verbose and cleaner way to represent the same concept. So Rust is in the process of adopting ? (It's in nightly now I believe). I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning). In English there have been similar things, and the controllers have always tried to stop their usage, "ain't" is a great example of that. English teachers across the US have always tried to stop its usage as a fake low class word, but it's just too good and they ain't going to stop it.
- chillacy 10y ago
  But Rust is still a controlled language in that there's a language committee updating it. It's just that the committee actually listens to its community. A true bottoms-up-controlled programming language would have to allow users to redefine keywords and grammar, then allow users to drift the language over time. Eventually you'll have multiple subgroups (accents) and one person's compiler might choke on the line `if x ain't 3`
  - mcguire 10y ago
lisivka 10y ago
Russian (Russish, русский) language is example of success of artificial language. It was language of books, used mainly in Orthodox churches, like Latin in Western Europe, but now it is spoken by hundreds of millions.
- antognini 10y ago
  Hebrew has a similar story in Israel. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language
  - _yosefk 10y ago
    I speak both languages, and AFAIK neither is nearly as artificial as Volapuk or Esperanto.
    - antognini 10y ago
      That's certainly true. But they're both examples of a community collectively deciding to learn and speak a non-native language.
- dragandj 10y ago
  What language the Russians spoke at that time then?
  - lisivka 10y ago
    Russians (Great Russians, Russish, русские, великоросы) were speaking their own native languages. For example, Putin is Uyghur. He is Russian and his native language is Russian, but Russian is not native language for Uyghurs. The longer explanation: There is three kinds of "Russians". Rus`, Rusyns, Russians. Rus` lived at Baltic Sea. Rus` means "red". They were warriors, i.e. their life was to fight, trade, and collect taxes. Their native language is unknown (probably, Old Norse). At times of Great Epidemic, they left their city (now known as Old Russa, Старая Русса) and "concurred" South and started to govern it, so territory of current Ukraine got name "Rus`". Slavish colonists at these territories got name "Rusyns" (русины) (see below). At time of expansion of Rus`, North people was concurred and paid taxes to Rus` (Лаврентеевская летопись, ст 4. об. «А вот другие народы, дающие дань Руси: чудь, меря, весь, мурома, черемисы, мордва, пермь, печера, ямь, литва, зимигола, корсь, нарова, ливонцы, - эти говорят на своих языках, они - потомство Иафета, живущее в северных странах.»). They got name "Russish" (русские). This was time of "Great Rus`", so North Russians are also known as "Great Russians" (Великоросы), while South Russians (Slavs) are also known as "Little (Core) Russians" (Малоросы). Summary: * Rus` - possibly warriors union or Varangians, native language (probably): Old Norse. * Rusyns (Ukrainians) - Slavish colonists governed by Rus`, native language: Slavish. * Russish (Russians) - native Europeans, native language: many, probably Finno-Ugric and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Russa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Russa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_%28name%29#From_Rus.27_to_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_%28name%29#From_Rus.27_to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples NOTE: -in, -yn, -an means "he/she" (modified "он" - "he"), -yny, -iny, -any, -ini, etc. - "they" (modified "они" - they) ("y" as in lynx). So Rysyn (русин) means "he is Rus`", Rysyny (русини) means "they are (people of) Rus`". Russians means "they are Russia", "россияне", but selfname of Russians is Russish ("русские"). Moreover, Russia is Greek name of Rus`, given by Catherine II (born in Prussia) to Moscovia, because Russia was used at West as name of past parts of Great Russia. Nikolai Kostomarov wrote something like "LOL, we are Russians now" at time of rename (ДЂло въ томъ, что названіе Руси укрЂпилось издревле за южнорусскимъ народомъ. Названіе не возникаетъ безъ факта. Нельзя навязать народу ни съ того, ни съ сего какое-нибудь имя. Это могло приходить въ голову только такимъ мудрецамъ, противъ которыхъ мы недавно писали (1) и которые намъ сообщили прекурьёзную новость, какъ Екатерина II, высочайшимъ повелЂніемъ, даровала Московскому народу имя Русскаго и запретила ему употреблять древнее свое имя — Московитяне.)
chillacy 10y ago
Esperanto seems to have learned its lesson and made itself un-changable, but forkable. > The only basis of the Esperanto language binding on all Esperantists, which no one has the right to change, is the little work Foundation of Esperanto. If anyone deviates from the rules and models given in the said work, he can never justify himself with the words "thus desires or advises the author of Esperanto". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto Changing the language too much is "kontraŭ fundamento"
- mcguire 10y ago
  I have seen complaints about "aeroporto" vs. "flugaveno" (?) though.
  - D-Coder 10y ago
    "Flughaveno" (flight-port). Similarly "flugmaŝino" (flight-machine) has generally disappeared for "aviadilo" (sort of "aviation-er"). Some of the vocabulary has drifted with technological and social changes. For example "svati," to matchmake, this has pretty much disappeared. But the grammar has changed very little.
Impl0x 10y ago
One of my favorite things I've learned during my time studying Esperanto is the word "volapukaĵo", which is constructed from "volapuk" as the root and means "nonsense". "Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me!"
- schoen 10y ago
  I've heard it claimed that there's an analogous verb volapuki 'to babble, talk nonsense' (but never seen someone use it).
  - klipt 10y ago
    Esperanto is very flexible about transforming verbs/nouns/adjectives into one another, so probably. Adjective would be volapuka (nonsensical)? Adverb would be volapuke (nonsensically?)
- snaily 10y ago
  Turns out Danish has the same construction in use ("thats just volapük [incomprehensible] to me"), so it's not just one conlang throwing shade at another.
fernly 10y ago
He mentions Lojban[0] but ironically fails to note that Lojban itself is a fork of Loglan[1]. It came about because the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, tried to keep tight control over its development by claiming intellectual property rights over it. However, Brown did not move fast enough toward finalizing, formalizing and documenting the language to satisfy some of the enthusiastic and inventive community that had formed around it. A group of those enthusiasts kept the basic concepts and syntax of Loglan (which they deemed not copyrightable) and created a new basic vocabulary to replace the words that Brown or the Loglan Institute could claim ownership of. (Reminiscent of the IP disputes over APIs versus implementations.) The result was Lojban, which continues to have a small community and a collection of translated documents and tutorials. [0] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
- jflatow 10y ago
  Which makes me think that the lesson of this story is not "avoid forking at all costs", but that building anything universal is a fragile endeavor. Anybody can just come along and obsolete your status with respect to that goal. As for being forgotten, it seems inevitable, if universality is your only selling point.
susan_hall 10y ago
This is certainly relevant for Lisp programmers: "Contrarily, major schisms or breakdowns in the relationships and development of a language and its community are big warning signs that should make you think twice about the future of a language." Related reading includes "The Lisp Curse": http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html And note that "Why Lisp Did Not and Never Will Gain Enough Traction" offers this alternative explanation: "Since there is so little pre choice, the glue that is supposed to hold a community together is too weak to draw enough people that would build up a momentum." http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-never-will-gain-enough-traction.html http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-ne...
- wtbob 10y ago
  Those are definitely some interesting ideas, but I'm uncertain to what extent they're actually true. I think that Common Lisp really does make choices for its programmers, and asks that they develop in a fashion such that their code can easily live with others (notably, the places where it doesn't — e.g. the common readtable — are nowadays regarded as mistakes). One of my several issues with Scheme is that historically it has made so few choices ('you have lists — develop whatever data structures you need!' & 'you have call/cc — develop whatever control structures you need!'). But that's a problem of Scheme (less so, in recent years), not of Lisp or the closely-related (to Scheme) Racket. There is definitely something to be said about how easy it is to get things done in Lisp: 'Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup' (from The Lisp Curse).
chrisfosterelli 10y ago
> there was another constructed language which once claimed nearly a million followers, making it the most popular constructed language of all time Maybe a nitpick, but Esperanto (which essentially replaced Volapuk) is estimated to have around 2 to 10 million speakers and is generally considered to be the most common constructed language now [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
nxzero 10y ago
Fall of languages is not bad thing. For example, without the fall of Volapük, it's very possible that Esperanto would not have taken off, since much of the early growth of Esperanto was a result of Volapük speakers looking for a new constructed language. If a community lacks reasoning, that is the real issue, not major battles, which might just means there is in fact a valid reasoning to split the community. Keeping a community together just for the sake of doing so is a recipe for failure.
pipio21 10y ago
At the time Latin was as universal in Europe as English is today. The Eulers and Newtons and Descartes spoke latin, in fact you can read it, today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri... Later German became the language of the philosophers and scientists and English the language of the practical engineering. English was not or is not gradually becoming a universal language, but suddenly after the US of A won the WWII(and everybody else lost, for example British lost their empire). After the war the US banned all scientific knowledge in German, and forced the use of English. Remember they took half the scientists of Germany with them(that later created their space program), the other half were taken by the Russians. In (inland)Europe we used to measure height of a plane over ground in meters before and during WWII. Kilometers for horizontal distance. When (North)Americans won it became the ruler of the world and imposed horizontal distance in miles, and height in feet. I speak several languages because I love to travel and it is completely different when you speak the native language. It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe). What I mean is that any empire will end, like any other empire has ended in the past, and things change over time. I believe the Universal language of the future will be machines translating with small delay and helping people learn other languages much faster.
- 13of40 10y ago
  > It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe). What's not polite is being prejudiced against an entire continent of people you've never met. If I happen to ask whether you speak English, I'm probably just trying to find the cheese aisle.
iopq 10y ago
But as an author of the Slovianski pan-Slavic language, I don't feel like this is a bad thing. Everyone who contributes on the forum has their own dialect: http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/ http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/ I prefer merging y and i, for example (although I don't always follow it myself, I experiment a lot)
jpatokal 10y ago
Well, there's also the fact that Volapuk is rather hideous and imports most of the worst features of its source languages wholesale. Nouns and pronouns inflect into multiple cases (genetive, dative, accusative...), verbs have literally thousands of conjugations, gender is retained, etc. Even Esperanto is often accused of Latin bias, but Volapuk takes this to a whole new (well, old) level.
rurban 10y ago
Citing the perl 6 fork leading to the decline of the whole language(s) is very interesting. What the author doesn't know is that not only perl6 forked off, also 4 other perl5 forks appeared during the last year, which is a strong sign of an already dying community and language. I'm one of the forkers (cperl). For me forking was a necessity since the perl5 community was not able to come up with any improvement at all since the author left 15 years ago. It rather managed to erode the codebase and the management (the perl5 "asshole" problem). "Faith" into the developers capabilities is a now a mandatory code of conduct point, even if the said devs did nothing to prove their capabilities in the last 15 years. Using religious arguments to hold people together might have worked in the middle ages and in a post-modern community. (perl is one, go figure). On the contrary the perl 6 and perl 5 leaders are making cynical jokes about their future, to the end that a new backend or a new fork will make the language and the community stronger. (https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM 2016 - "The Ongoing Disaster That Is Perl 5‎" - Ricardo Signes) Which is of course wrong. We don't need Volapük and the Kerckhoff fork to show this. There are many bad examples in the BSD land, the latest DragonflyBSD, and many more on debian forks. Now to the arguments why to fork: * perl5 argues that forking (experiments) are good, and if successful will lead to "stealing" the good parts. This never happened so far with perl5. They rather blocked competing forks to submit bugfixes and discuss critical failures upstream. While the forks manage to enhance security, performance and add many wanted features (which were not added in the last 15 years since they were designed by perl6), upstream did nothing. It didn't even merge the security fixes. If a community is that broken, it needs to fork to be able to survive. However with parrot, the perl6 backend, it worked fine. The unfriendly fork (MoarVM) eventually replaced parrot, using a much simpler architecture. This was an easy fork, because they could simply replace it upstream. No need to persuade the community to switch over. * If a product is broken beyond repair, make a new one. People will switch eventually. Do people use better ssl libraries over openssl? Some do, but most don't. E.g for perl there's not a single TLS library binding other than to OpenSSL/NetSSLeay. No boringssl, no libressl, no PolarSSL (mbed TLS), no NSS. For crypto no libsodium. Did HHVM survive? Well, the php devs eventually got off its ass and made an ever better version with PHP7. They didn't steal much, they rather re-architectured the whole mess. This is the best example of a successful fork which strengthened everybody. Pressure. The GCC fork under schmorp to use the new intel Pentium intrinsics was also eventually successful. I cannot say much about Python 3, only that the inherent VM problems where not solved at all and only the forks (pypy, Graal, mypy) are able to overcome that technical debt partially. ruby has it's number of forks but is still paying for it's ruby on rails meta-architecture disaster.

80 points by anewhnaccount 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago

Language home page: http://volapük.com/ http://volapük.com/

tormeh 10y ago
I'm fluent in English, know a fair bit of German and some very basic French and I can't understand any Volapük. If Europe's ever going to speak the same language it's going to be through the languages growing closer, eliminating different spellings of existing loanwords and creating new ones that are universal. None of the knowledge I have of European languages carry over to Volapük, at least in terms of vocabulary. That, to me, looks like a mistake on Volapük's part.
- schoen 10y ago
  You would probably have a very different experience with Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua (The weirdest thing for me about it as a Latin and Portuguese speaker is that adjectives aren't inflected for number, so you have phrases like "servicios tangibile" and "contributiones actual", which sound kind of bizarre throughout the Romance milieu, where the adjectives would have to be pluralized too.) You can see some sample texts at http://www.interlingua.com/ http://www.interlingua.com/ or for example http://www.interlingua.com/libros/ http://www.interlingua.com/libros/ Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-)
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-) Well, if at least one of those multiple European languages is a Romance tongue, sure. But if someone speaks fluent Manx, English, Icelandic and Norwegian, he'll probably have more than a little trouble with it …
    - schoen 10y ago
      It would definitely be quite a bit harder, but all of those languages will have had some degree of Latin and Romance borrowing so they'll still confer at least a little benefit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bluejekyll 10y ago

> Volapük was a hybrid of English, German, and French I found this funny, because that's basically what English is.

yborg 10y ago
English is more of a mongrel than that even, there are substantial additions from Latin and Greek as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...
- Grue3 10y ago
  Name any (natural) language that's "pure". English is hardly unique in that respect.
  - jrochkind1 10y ago
    No languages are pure, although some languages in modern times have official national bodies trying to keep them as 'pure' as possible (like French), they're still not 'pure' in any way. But English is especially hybrid. Some think that contributed to it's global popularity as a second language, but I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English.
    - jmfayard 10y ago
      > I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English ... and if you want to argue otherwise, you will have to explain why russian had such good linguistic characteristics in east-europe between 1945 and 1989, and not so much since then :)
- 13of40 10y ago
  That's a very aptly named PIE chart.

bluejekyll 10y ago

> lesson to be learned here: any language is only as strong as its community Or maybe it's better lesson is that no one tries to force the direction of the language. English is a bastard language, no one "controls", even as much as our grammar school teachers try to force us to use the proper form. I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively. The examples that the OP point out are top down choices made by "leaders" of the community. Those leaders may have created the original programming language, but then fail to realize that it is not they that control it, it is the community. And communities often don't want to be forced in one direction or another. What they like is for things to be grass roots, everyone in the community recognizes the issue, a proposal is put forward, and everyone then agrees and progress is made. This is one reason that I'm enjoying Rust's process, example: try!(..) was a macro based bandaid over the unwieldy nature of the strong error Result type in the language, it's usage has created code which is ugly and verbose. Enter Swift with its ? syntax and everyone recognizes that this is a less verbose and cleaner way to represent the same concept. So Rust is in the process of adopting ? (It's in nightly now I believe). I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning). In English there have been similar things, and the controllers have always tried to stop their usage, "ain't" is a great example of that. English teachers across the US have always tried to stop its usage as a fake low class word, but it's just too good and they ain't going to stop it.

chillacy 10y ago
But Rust is still a controlled language in that there's a language committee updating it. It's just that the committee actually listens to its community. A true bottoms-up-controlled programming language would have to allow users to redefine keywords and grammar, then allow users to drift the language over time. Eventually you'll have multiple subgroups (accents) and one person's compiler might choke on the line `if x ain't 3`
- mcguire 10y ago

lisivka 10y ago

Russian (Russish, русский) language is example of success of artificial language. It was language of books, used mainly in Orthodox churches, like Latin in Western Europe, but now it is spoken by hundreds of millions.

antognini 10y ago
Hebrew has a similar story in Israel. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language
- _yosefk 10y ago
  I speak both languages, and AFAIK neither is nearly as artificial as Volapuk or Esperanto.
  - antognini 10y ago
    That's certainly true. But they're both examples of a community collectively deciding to learn and speak a non-native language.
dragandj 10y ago
What language the Russians spoke at that time then?
- lisivka 10y ago
  Russians (Great Russians, Russish, русские, великоросы) were speaking their own native languages. For example, Putin is Uyghur. He is Russian and his native language is Russian, but Russian is not native language for Uyghurs. The longer explanation: There is three kinds of "Russians". Rus`, Rusyns, Russians. Rus` lived at Baltic Sea. Rus` means "red". They were warriors, i.e. their life was to fight, trade, and collect taxes. Their native language is unknown (probably, Old Norse). At times of Great Epidemic, they left their city (now known as Old Russa, Старая Русса) and "concurred" South and started to govern it, so territory of current Ukraine got name "Rus`". Slavish colonists at these territories got name "Rusyns" (русины) (see below). At time of expansion of Rus`, North people was concurred and paid taxes to Rus` (Лаврентеевская летопись, ст 4. об. «А вот другие народы, дающие дань Руси: чудь, меря, весь, мурома, черемисы, мордва, пермь, печера, ямь, литва, зимигола, корсь, нарова, ливонцы, - эти говорят на своих языках, они - потомство Иафета, живущее в северных странах.»). They got name "Russish" (русские). This was time of "Great Rus`", so North Russians are also known as "Great Russians" (Великоросы), while South Russians (Slavs) are also known as "Little (Core) Russians" (Малоросы). Summary: * Rus` - possibly warriors union or Varangians, native language (probably): Old Norse. * Rusyns (Ukrainians) - Slavish colonists governed by Rus`, native language: Slavish. * Russish (Russians) - native Europeans, native language: many, probably Finno-Ugric and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Russa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Russa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_%28name%29#From_Rus.27_to_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_%28name%29#From_Rus.27_to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples NOTE: -in, -yn, -an means "he/she" (modified "он" - "he"), -yny, -iny, -any, -ini, etc. - "they" (modified "они" - they) ("y" as in lynx). So Rysyn (русин) means "he is Rus`", Rysyny (русини) means "they are (people of) Rus`". Russians means "they are Russia", "россияне", but selfname of Russians is Russish ("русские"). Moreover, Russia is Greek name of Rus`, given by Catherine II (born in Prussia) to Moscovia, because Russia was used at West as name of past parts of Great Russia. Nikolai Kostomarov wrote something like "LOL, we are Russians now" at time of rename (ДЂло въ томъ, что названіе Руси укрЂпилось издревле за южнорусскимъ народомъ. Названіе не возникаетъ безъ факта. Нельзя навязать народу ни съ того, ни съ сего какое-нибудь имя. Это могло приходить въ голову только такимъ мудрецамъ, противъ которыхъ мы недавно писали (1) и которые намъ сообщили прекурьёзную новость, какъ Екатерина II, высочайшимъ повелЂніемъ, даровала Московскому народу имя Русскаго и запретила ему употреблять древнее свое имя — Московитяне.)

chillacy 10y ago

Esperanto seems to have learned its lesson and made itself un-changable, but forkable. > The only basis of the Esperanto language binding on all Esperantists, which no one has the right to change, is the little work Foundation of Esperanto. If anyone deviates from the rules and models given in the said work, he can never justify himself with the words "thus desires or advises the author of Esperanto". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto Changing the language too much is "kontraŭ fundamento"

mcguire 10y ago
I have seen complaints about "aeroporto" vs. "flugaveno" (?) though.
- D-Coder 10y ago
  "Flughaveno" (flight-port). Similarly "flugmaŝino" (flight-machine) has generally disappeared for "aviadilo" (sort of "aviation-er"). Some of the vocabulary has drifted with technological and social changes. For example "svati," to matchmake, this has pretty much disappeared. But the grammar has changed very little.

Impl0x 10y ago

One of my favorite things I've learned during my time studying Esperanto is the word "volapukaĵo", which is constructed from "volapuk" as the root and means "nonsense". "Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me!"

schoen 10y ago
I've heard it claimed that there's an analogous verb volapuki 'to babble, talk nonsense' (but never seen someone use it).
- klipt 10y ago
  Esperanto is very flexible about transforming verbs/nouns/adjectives into one another, so probably. Adjective would be volapuka (nonsensical)? Adverb would be volapuke (nonsensically?)
snaily 10y ago
Turns out Danish has the same construction in use ("thats just volapük [incomprehensible] to me"), so it's not just one conlang throwing shade at another.

fernly 10y ago

He mentions Lojban[0] but ironically fails to note that Lojban itself is a fork of Loglan[1]. It came about because the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, tried to keep tight control over its development by claiming intellectual property rights over it. However, Brown did not move fast enough toward finalizing, formalizing and documenting the language to satisfy some of the enthusiastic and inventive community that had formed around it. A group of those enthusiasts kept the basic concepts and syntax of Loglan (which they deemed not copyrightable) and created a new basic vocabulary to replace the words that Brown or the Loglan Institute could claim ownership of. (Reminiscent of the IP disputes over APIs versus implementations.) The result was Lojban, which continues to have a small community and a collection of translated documents and tutorials. [0] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

jflatow 10y ago
Which makes me think that the lesson of this story is not "avoid forking at all costs", but that building anything universal is a fragile endeavor. Anybody can just come along and obsolete your status with respect to that goal. As for being forgotten, it seems inevitable, if universality is your only selling point.

susan_hall 10y ago

This is certainly relevant for Lisp programmers: "Contrarily, major schisms or breakdowns in the relationships and development of a language and its community are big warning signs that should make you think twice about the future of a language." Related reading includes "The Lisp Curse": http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html And note that "Why Lisp Did Not and Never Will Gain Enough Traction" offers this alternative explanation: "Since there is so little pre choice, the glue that is supposed to hold a community together is too weak to draw enough people that would build up a momentum." http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-never-will-gain-enough-traction.html http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-ne...

wtbob 10y ago
Those are definitely some interesting ideas, but I'm uncertain to what extent they're actually true. I think that Common Lisp really does make choices for its programmers, and asks that they develop in a fashion such that their code can easily live with others (notably, the places where it doesn't — e.g. the common readtable — are nowadays regarded as mistakes). One of my several issues with Scheme is that historically it has made so few choices ('you have lists — develop whatever data structures you need!' & 'you have call/cc — develop whatever control structures you need!'). But that's a problem of Scheme (less so, in recent years), not of Lisp or the closely-related (to Scheme) Racket. There is definitely something to be said about how easy it is to get things done in Lisp: 'Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup' (from The Lisp Curse).

chrisfosterelli 10y ago

> there was another constructed language which once claimed nearly a million followers, making it the most popular constructed language of all time Maybe a nitpick, but Esperanto (which essentially replaced Volapuk) is estimated to have around 2 to 10 million speakers and is generally considered to be the most common constructed language now [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

nxzero 10y ago

Fall of languages is not bad thing. For example, without the fall of Volapük, it's very possible that Esperanto would not have taken off, since much of the early growth of Esperanto was a result of Volapük speakers looking for a new constructed language. If a community lacks reasoning, that is the real issue, not major battles, which might just means there is in fact a valid reasoning to split the community. Keeping a community together just for the sake of doing so is a recipe for failure.

pipio21 10y ago

At the time Latin was as universal in Europe as English is today. The Eulers and Newtons and Descartes spoke latin, in fact you can read it, today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri... Later German became the language of the philosophers and scientists and English the language of the practical engineering. English was not or is not gradually becoming a universal language, but suddenly after the US of A won the WWII(and everybody else lost, for example British lost their empire). After the war the US banned all scientific knowledge in German, and forced the use of English. Remember they took half the scientists of Germany with them(that later created their space program), the other half were taken by the Russians. In (inland)Europe we used to measure height of a plane over ground in meters before and during WWII. Kilometers for horizontal distance. When (North)Americans won it became the ruler of the world and imposed horizontal distance in miles, and height in feet. I speak several languages because I love to travel and it is completely different when you speak the native language. It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe). What I mean is that any empire will end, like any other empire has ended in the past, and things change over time. I believe the Universal language of the future will be machines translating with small delay and helping people learn other languages much faster.

13of40 10y ago
> It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe). What's not polite is being prejudiced against an entire continent of people you've never met. If I happen to ask whether you speak English, I'm probably just trying to find the cheese aisle.

iopq 10y ago

But as an author of the Slovianski pan-Slavic language, I don't feel like this is a bad thing. Everyone who contributes on the forum has their own dialect: http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/ http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/ I prefer merging y and i, for example (although I don't always follow it myself, I experiment a lot)

jpatokal 10y ago

Well, there's also the fact that Volapuk is rather hideous and imports most of the worst features of its source languages wholesale. Nouns and pronouns inflect into multiple cases (genetive, dative, accusative...), verbs have literally thousands of conjugations, gender is retained, etc. Even Esperanto is often accused of Latin bias, but Volapuk takes this to a whole new (well, old) level.

rurban 10y ago

Citing the perl 6 fork leading to the decline of the whole language(s) is very interesting. What the author doesn't know is that not only perl6 forked off, also 4 other perl5 forks appeared during the last year, which is a strong sign of an already dying community and language. I'm one of the forkers (cperl). For me forking was a necessity since the perl5 community was not able to come up with any improvement at all since the author left 15 years ago. It rather managed to erode the codebase and the management (the perl5 "asshole" problem). "Faith" into the developers capabilities is a now a mandatory code of conduct point, even if the said devs did nothing to prove their capabilities in the last 15 years. Using religious arguments to hold people together might have worked in the middle ages and in a post-modern community. (perl is one, go figure). On the contrary the perl 6 and perl 5 leaders are making cynical jokes about their future, to the end that a new backend or a new fork will make the language and the community stronger. (https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM 2016 - "The Ongoing Disaster That Is Perl 5‎" - Ricardo Signes) Which is of course wrong. We don't need Volapük and the Kerckhoff fork to show this. There are many bad examples in the BSD land, the latest DragonflyBSD, and many more on debian forks. Now to the arguments why to fork: * perl5 argues that forking (experiments) are good, and if successful will lead to "stealing" the good parts. This never happened so far with perl5. They rather blocked competing forks to submit bugfixes and discuss critical failures upstream. While the forks manage to enhance security, performance and add many wanted features (which were not added in the last 15 years since they were designed by perl6), upstream did nothing. It didn't even merge the security fixes. If a community is that broken, it needs to fork to be able to survive. However with parrot, the perl6 backend, it worked fine. The unfriendly fork (MoarVM) eventually replaced parrot, using a much simpler architecture. This was an easy fork, because they could simply replace it upstream. No need to persuade the community to switch over. * If a product is broken beyond repair, make a new one. People will switch eventually. Do people use better ssl libraries over openssl? Some do, but most don't. E.g for perl there's not a single TLS library binding other than to OpenSSL/NetSSLeay. No boringssl, no libressl, no PolarSSL (mbed TLS), no NSS. For crypto no libsodium. Did HHVM survive? Well, the php devs eventually got off its ass and made an ever better version with PHP7. They didn't steal much, they rather re-architectured the whole mess. This is the best example of a successful fork which strengthened everybody. Pressure. The GCC fork under schmorp to use the new intel Pentium intrinsics was also eventually successful. I cannot say much about Python 3, only that the inherent VM problems where not solved at all and only the forks (pypy, Graal, mypy) are able to overcome that technical debt partially. ruby has it's number of forks but is still paying for it's ruby on rails meta-architecture disaster.